This changed somewhat this past fall when I took Professor Anton Ford’s lecture class “Justice,” which focused exclusively on the ethical writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. I immediately noted a few of Ford’s distinguishing characteristics: the thick ocular frames of an architect, the humorous gesticulations of Jerry Seinfeld, and the doughnutphilia of Homer Simpson. “If one finds a box of doughnuts in a hallway, is she forced to eat them, doughnuts being unmistakably delicious?” waxed Ford during a lecture on Book III of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which, among other things, addresses the question What does it mean to act voluntarily? According to Ford, under Aristotelian logic, eating these doughnuts would not constitute an involuntary act, which only occurs when one is compelled to do something by another or under threat of a greater evil. “Doughnuts are not an absolute good,” explained Ford. “You choose whether or not to eat another’s doughnuts; the act, therefore, cannot be justified.”
As an undergraduate student who’s spent nearly four years at the University of Chicago, I’ve slowly become skeptical that anything can be good for its own sake. A storm of qualifications, footnotes, and further edits besiege my class discussions and casual conversations daily. By the start of my senior year it seemed the time for innocent assertions had passed.
We seemed to have established some sort of baseline for doughnut virtue, and yet a doughnut cannot exist in a vacuum—it is inevitably influenced by societal whims and market forces; never has that been more apparent than right now. Nightwood has been offering doughnuts at brunch for some time; a recent variety is invitingly described as “vanilla custard, raspberry glaze, Peeps.” Popular dessert oasis Mindy’s Hot Chocolate sells brioche doughnuts with hot fudge and caramel corn, while Longman & Eagle currently has on its menu a “Charred Olive Oil Doughnut, Bangladeshi Almond Cream, Tanzanian Hot Chocolate, Hazelnut Praline, Aerated Orange.” Is a doughnut still a doughnut if it’s composed of more adjectives than substantive bites?
